What's cooking at MSN Adlabs?

In its effort to entrench itself in the search community, MSN has made significant investments not only in technology and personnel, but in the area of research as well. One such example is Microsoft adCenter Labs.

AdLabs was created in early 2006 but has been steadily expanded and improved over the course of the year. Today it boasts some of the most innovative free research tools available to search marketers and is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Some of the tools available in adLabs and their potential applications are:

Keyword Group Detection - By extracting themes from a specific query, this tool provides terms that are relevant or similar to that query.

Keyword Mutation Detection - This tool shows common misspellings and other variations of a particular query. It is very helpful in building a keyword list and ensuring that one has covered all the possible ways in which someone might spell one’s brand name, product name, etc.

Search Funnels - With the notion of the funnel being all the rage these days, this handy tool shows the specific queries immediately before or after the keyword you enter. Options include drilling down within the funnel (e.g. "cars" > "used cars" > "mitsubishi") and adjusting the number of subsequent queries you want to view.

Search Result Clustering - This tool semantically clusters results for a query in a number of different ways ranging from questions and answers to displaying relationships among people.

Forecasting Search Volume Seasonality - While it doesn't quite roll off the tongue like Google Trends, MSN's version is decidedly more robust if potentially less directional, due to its smaller share of overall searches. For one, it shows absolute search volume for each query, whereas Google just shows positioning relative to the axis. MSN also shows actual vs. forecast volume.

Keyword Forecast - Perhaps the most immediately actionable tool in adLabs, the Keyword Forecast allows you to view actual impressions for a query by month for the past 12 months. It also overlays the age and gender distribution of the individuals who submitted that query. And, to top it all off, the results can be viewed in pictures or text for easy export into PowerPoint or Excel.

Detecting Online Commercial Intention - This tool predicts the intent of each query based on the likelihood that it is commercial or noncommercial. It also ranks specific Web sites and further delineates commercial sites by informational or transactional.

Update by Sunny: MSN’s adlabs is certainly adding new feathers to the Search Engine Experience Cap. Lots more is still awaited until it finally rolls out in full swing. So lets keep our fingers crossed and keep searching : )

Source: MediaPost